A is for apples

It's time to get out all those teacher apple gifts.

Apple, apple, /a/, /a/, /a/          

Sounds like Fun CD from Discovery Toys has a wonderful song that calmly practices the initial sounds of the alphabet.
There is also a free Ipad app that you can use.  

Do you know the story of the "Little House with no doors"?  You must have an apple and sharp knife as you tell the story.
Once upon a time there was a little boy who grew tired of all his toys and games.  He asked his mother, "What shall I do?
  "You shall go on a journey and find a little red house with no windows or doors and a star inside.  Come back as soon as you can."  
So the boy started out on his journey and he found a little girl and he asked her, "Do you know where I can find a little  red house with no windows and doors and a star inside?"  
"Ask my father, the farmer, he may know."  So the little boy found the farmer and asked him, "Do you know where I can find a little red house with no windows and no doors and a star inside?"  The farmer laughed and said, "I've lived many years but I've never seen anything like it -- go ask Granny-- she knows everything!"
So the little boy asked Granny, "Please Granny, where can I find a house with no windows and doors and a star inside."
"I'd like to find that house myself, it would be warm in the winter and the starlight would be beautiful.  Go ask the wind-- maybe he knows."
The wind whistled by the little boy and the boy said, "Oh, wind, can you help me find a little red house with no windows and doors and a star inside."  The  wind cannot speak any words but it went on singing ahead of the little boy until it came to an apple tree and shook the branches.  Down came a beautiful red apple. (Show your apple)  
The little boy picked it up and looked at it.  It was a little red house that had no windows or doors.  "I wonder," said the boy.  He took out his jackknife from his pocket and cut the apple in half. (cut apple sideways)  
How wonderful!  There in the center was a star holding little brown seeds.  He ran home and showed his mother.  "Look, I found it!"

Position words
Cut out apples and worms.  Give students two apples and one worm.  Tell them to put the apples side-by-side, put the worm above the apples, below the apples, between the two apples, at the bottom of an apple, at the top of one apple, over the two apples, etc.

Pick out your favorite stories about apples.

The Apple Pie Tree 
Ten Apples Up on Top

There are so many FREE and ready to print for a small fee apple activities on TeachersPayTeachers, Pintrest and just google ideas for kindergarten. 

MATH activities
Make or print trees and use apple erasers or red painted lima beans as counters. 

• Roll a die or use number cards to tell how many apples to put on your tree. 

• Addition number sentences can also be used.  (paint  lima beans yellow or green to show two sets--though real trees don't have two colors/kinds of apples)

• Practice 'take away' (subtraction), how many are left?

• How many more?  Students roll die and count out apples.  Ask how many more do you need to have 10 apples?  

Reading sight words printed on apple shapes.  
Make a memory game with sight words, letter match, shape match, letter and beginning sound pictures.

There will be more soon...keep watching because...

 Hand-in-hand, we grow!

P is for Pizza

Next week we will be teaching/reviewing the letter Pp with writing and initial sound practice.

"P", pizza,  /p/

I love to do Dr. Jean and Raffi's "I like to eat pepperoni pizza" song.
"I like to eat, eat, eat, pepperoni pizza.
I like to eat, eat, eat, pepperoni pizza."

I've made a pizza flip book to substitute the long vowel sound for each verse.  
Long a - "A lake tay ate, ate, ate paperana pazza..."
Long e -  "E leek te ete, ete, ete pepperene pezze..."
Long i -  "I like ti ite, ite, ite, pippirini pizzi..."
Long o -  "O loke toe ote, ote, ote, popporono pozzo..."
Long u -  "U luke tue ute, ute, ute, puppurunu puzzu..."
(I will also use this pizza book when we practice our long vowel sounds.)

These two pizza stories are fun to read and the kids LOVE them.  A boy named Pete becomes a pizza in Pete's a Pizza by William Steg.   I do explain to help some students' understand that the little boy is rolled, patted, baked as his dad pretends that he is the parts of the pizza.  
Pizza Pat by Rita Golden Gelman is a cumulative rhyming pizza version of "the house that Jack built" style.


For Math practice, I made felt pizza topping cutouts.  I took the idea from Dr. Jean and tweaked it for my supplies.  I had felt scraps rather than using fun foam.

Green rectangles- green pepper
Yellow triangles - cheese 
Brown ovals - sausage
Cream - mushrooms
Large Red circle - sauce
Gold circles painted with red sharpie - pepperoni
Black circles - olives

I didn't want to use red felt for my pepperoni pieces because my sauce is red.  I had gold scraps of felt and used a red Sharpie to color and some brown dots for my pepperoni pieces.  It had to look real to me.

I used a hole punch on a black strip of felt and cut out the olives.  I had to punch a piece of sandpaper to keep the punch cutting through. 
I also made oval sausages and rectangle green pepper pieces.  I wanted the kids to have to tell me the name of the shapes since rectangle and triangle are words they mix up. 

Recipe directions cards 

Cards will direct how each student will build their pizza and practice how to read a picture key.  I made cards in differentiated levels to practice and challenge students.


Following directions, coloring and counting 
Students can make a pizza with felt toppings then record on a card so another student must build by following their directions. 
Pizza puzzles

Students can design and color their favorite version of pizza.  Students can cut apart or teacher cut into pieces and then share their puzzle with classmates to put it back together.
Each year I seem to add and substitute activities.
I don't always do every activity, it depends on my group and their needs.

Hand-in-hand, we'll grow. 

I think I'm having pizza for dinner! 

It's November before Thanksgiving

It's November
The first early days of November I still do pumpkin activities post-Halloween.  We color, cut and sequence four sizes of pumpkins and show from left to right sequencing large to small.


We traced numbers in pumpkins and played a partner game to roll a die and coverup the numbers in order.  Who covers all their numbers first. 

Disguise a turkey home project.  TURKEY TROUBLE by Wendi Silvano was read and an invitation to disguise the turkey picture with their family at home.

The Turkey-in-disguise creations were displayed and the school could vote on which turkey they liked.  Our families are very creative!




Tell this story and conclude with a yummy popcorn snack.

The Magic Seeds by Ann R. Lee

All the Pilgrim women of Plymouth, Massachusetts, were busy cooking Thanksgiving dinner.  Some of them cooked over fires out-of-doors.  The dinner table was out-of-doors too.  It was set and ready for the Pilgrims and their Indian friends.
The Pilgrim women were happy as they cooked.  At last they had enough food to eat.  Their Indian friends had helped the Pilgrim men to plant corn, catch fish, and hunt birds and animals for food.  The pilgrims were very thankful that they had enough to eat.  So they had decided to have a Thanks giving dinner.  Because the Indians had helped them so much, the Pilgrims had asked the Indians to eat dinner with them.
The Indian chief and many members of his tribe came to this first Thanksgiving dinner.  They brought food and gifts for the Pilgrims.
One of the Indians who brought gifts was Quadequina, the chief's brother.  Quadequina stood with two deerskin bags in his hands.  The Pilgrims crowded around him.
Quadequina reached into one deerskin bag.  When he pulled his hand out of the bag, it was full of fluffy, little white things.
"What are they?  They look like tiny white flowers!" a Pilgrim girl said.
Quadequina laughed and put some of the white pieces on the Pilgrim girl's hair.  But next, he did a strange thing.  He popped a few of the white pieces into his mouth!
"Why, it is some kind of food." a Pilgrim man said.
Quadequina nodded his head.  He reached into the other deerskin bag.  He took out a handful of small seeds that looked like corn.  Then he walked over to a cooking-fire that was burning inside a circle of rocks.  He put the handful of seeds on one of the hot rocks.  Then he stood waiting
Pop!   Pop!   Pop!
Quadequina laughed as the Pilgrims gasped in surprise!  The seeds jumped off the hot rock as they popped.  And as they popped, they turned into the white fluffy things that Quadequina had taken from the first bag.
"Look" a Pilgrim boy shouted, "It's magic!"
One of the Pilgrims tasted this new kind of food.  "Ummm Delicious!" he said.
That's how the Pilgrims first learned about popcorn.  The Indians were eating popcorn long before the Pilgrims came to America.  Indians wore strings of popcorn around their necks and one around their heads when they danced.
It was thought that popcorn was eaten by people thousands of years ago.  But Pilgrim women were the first mothers to serve popcorn for breakfast with sugar and cream.  Popcorn was the first "puffed" breakfast cereal.
Today not many people eat popcorn with sugar and cream.  But each year, lots of people eat popcorn with butter and salt as a tasty treat.

One year a teaching friend was the narrator and I acted out the part of Quadequina.  I donned a headband yarn braid and a Halloween 'native American' costume.  Even to this day, I get the giggles about it.  The adults enjoyed it as much as the kids.  We used a hot air popcorn popper to dramatize the popping.  

 

Thanksgiving and friendship

THE INDIAN BOWL by Jean Marzollo
I found this story in Scholastic's LETS FIND OUT weekly news in my early years teaching. (It is dated November 1974!)
Every year I tell this story about an Indian (Native American) girl who sees another girl (pilgrim) and wants to be her friend.  Despite the language barrier, she presents her with a homemade bowl.
This is a wonderful story to discuss sharing and making friends.

THE INDIAN BOWL
Once upon a time Moon Flower decided to make a small bowl by herself.  She had watched her mother do this many times and had even helped some, but never had she made a bowl from start to finish all alone.  Now she wanted to for Moon Flower had a new friend.  Well, not exactly a friend..yet.  The day before when Moon Flower was picking berries, she had seen a girl like herself, but different.  The other girl had lighter skin and wore strange clothes.  But Moon Flower liked her and wanted to give her a gift.

So alone she went to the river bank and picked some rushes. (reeds--tall thick grass)  Back at the camp, she boiled them for strength in an iron pot over a wood fire.  Before they dried, she wove them in and out to make a "puki," a rush basket.
When the basket was dry, she went back to the river bank to dig clay.  She spread the clay out on a stone to look for pebbles.  (If there were any pebbles left in the clay, they would later crack the bowl.)  She worked the clay with her hands to find any small pebbles that were still left.
Back again at the camp, she flattened the clay into a pancake shape and pressed it over the puki, which was now turned upside-down.  When the clay was dry, she asked her mother to fire it.  Her mother, surprised that Moon Flower had made a bowl by herself, was   

pleased.  She put the bowl in an open pit in which there was a fire covered with hot stones.  The bowl
sat on the stones for several hours.  The rushes burned away but the bowl didn't; instead the heat made it harder and stronger.  After the fire had burned out and the bowl had cooled, Moon Flower picked it up.  It was perfect; inside she could see the marks the rushes had left.
Carefully she walked back to the berry patch and waited.  Sure enough, after a while the girl in the odd clothes came along.  Moon Flower quietly and shyly walked over and handed her the bowl.
Moon Flower and the other girl couldn't talk with each other because they spoke different languages.  But it didn't matter.  Their smiles made it clear that they were to be friends.

I have used this story so much that I just tell it.  I also act it out pantomiming which gives it a real feel to the kids.  I once had pressed playdoh on the back side of a rough basket as in the story.  Then showed them the indentions of the basket weave.  (Aw wow effect) 😲

We also use homemade playdoh and make pinch pots to take and share with their family for Thanksgiving.  We left these by the window to dry for at least 4 days.  I always make a few extra in case they crack too much when air drying.


In Art class, they have made clay pots which are glazed and kiln fired.
These are much 'fancier' and stronger.









It may be too late to make these clay bowls this year so file the idea for next year.
Tomorrow I will  share a story about Magic Seeds.  Get out your popcorn popper to demonstrate.  Enjoy.